I raised this objection on Ksvanhorn's initial post, though it came rather late, so I'm not sure if anyone saw it. You'll have to forgive me in advance, as most of this math is beyond my current level of familiarity.
In the original post, Ksvanhorn states:
The statement of the problem implies that the distributions for PM and PT, conditional on H being false, are identical, but not necessarily independent.
My understanding is that Neal's solution assumes that the sets of possible experience streams for Sleeping Beauty before answering the question are ide...
I feel like you might be appealing to consequences here a bit. Whether or not it is tractable in theory to follow the rule as an absolute (that is, to the letter) is a different problem from whether or not people will actually choose to do so.
It seems that Scott is more concerned about finding a formulation that can be followed to the letter in theory, while at the same time he has already conceded that most people will not choose to do so regardless of the formulation (and will thus follow the spirit instead).
You make a good point. I didn't sufficiently define what good or "honorable" debate looks like, so that's a massive hole in my reasoning. Thanks for bringing that up!
I very much appreciate your feedback, thank you!
I'm completely in agreement with you as to your proposed structure of article-writing, and in thinking about future pieces, I've visualized them in exactly those terms. As it happens, I actually did exactly that for this piece, since it grew from a separate piece that was getting very off-topic.
That said, my Glide Meditations aren't really meant to be a "cohesive" body of work in the sense that they build off of each other to reach a final conclusion. They're more like individual reading responses s...
I think it might be helpful to taboo the term "standardized employees" here, because I strongly suspect that you and cousin_it are defining the term differently.
cousin_it seems to be suggesting that education tends to produce people who have a similar skillset or body of knowledge. This is what having a degree implies; that one has attained a certain level of knowledge that an educational institution has deemed acceptable to qualify for receiving the degree. This is part of the reason why employers look for various degree levels, as the level of ...
I think this post beautifully (though indirectly) illustrates a few things:
In the first example you give, the error in pointing out a motte-and-bailey is that a motte-and-bailey hasn't actually occurred in the context of the conversation. If we bring up the bailey before it has actually been presented as an argument, we imply that we expect the other person to use...
It may be that none of my readers need the lecture at this point, but I've learned to be cautious about that sort of thing, so I'll walk through the difference anyways.
One of my favorite literature professors used to tell me that one should always write under the assumption that each piece one writes is the first piece of one's work that the reader has encountered. Not only does this make one's writing more accessible (because odds are there will be someone for whom that is true!), it also helps us to be internally consistent, because we have to summari...
If I'm understanding you correctly, and your point is "Toolbox thinking and lawful thinking are metatools in metatoolboxes, and should be used accordingly", then you actually are arguing that toolbox reasoning is the universally best context-insensitive metaway to think.
Eliezer's argument in this post is that "toolbox reasoning is the best way to think" is ambiguous between at least three interpretations:
I suddenly have the strangest compulsion to go and summarize the entire Bible in this style... really gave me good laugh. Thank you for this, truly. :)
Maybe your point is that "lie" feels like a natural category in a way that "meta-lie" doesn't, so basing your clear bright moral lines around the latter category feels unduly arbitrary?
You've actually hit the nail right on the head and put my thoughts into words I couldn't quite find, thank you.
Any moral code that contains non-absolute rules (in this case, "Don't lie, except when...") will of course require some amount of arbitrariness to distinguish it from the infinite range of other possibilities, but given the amount of...
Regarding meta-honesty:
I'm going to flip the usual jargon on its head and say that I "agree connotatively, but disagree denotatively".
Meta-honesty - that is, "honesty about honesty" - is, like many meta-concepts, interesting to think about, but I don't quite understand why it needs to be formulated as some sort of "code". As you've presented it here, this "meta-honesty code" seems largely intractable in normal communication, and comes across as an overly-complicated way of simply refusing to hold up "Do not lie&...
You're right, I've definitely made the base assumption that the point of debate is to win. But even if you're only debating someone to learn (which I did touch upon briefly when I mentioned "epistemological weight-lifting"), you're probably not going to get much out of it unless you're actually doing your best to present your best arguments and reasoning, that is, acting as if your goal was to win, even if that isn't your actual goal. From that standpoint, debating to learn and debating to win should be mechanically indistinguishable.
And yes, I completely agree that debating people far above my weight class would be an enlightening and exciting experience all on its own!
That's a very good point. I suppose I could have tightened my terminology in that regard, but ultimately it's a (perhaps misguided) base assumption of mine that "Success in debate is primarily determined by the strength of one's evidence", so I'm not sure I would have anticipated that argument even given more time. I frequently forget that "debate" constitutes a skillset all its own.
Yes, given your explanation, I do understand what you're trying to say, and I don't feel that you've sufficiently made your case. For example, how would your formulation handle tacit knowledge, given that such knowledge is inherently difficult or impossible to translate?
Or, to give a different example: suppose I have a puzzle with four pieces. The puzzle's edges do not form a regular polygon, and each piece is a simple geometric shape, such that the correct orientation of the pieces is ambiguous without already knowing the correct orientation. I have a pic...
Please forgive me if I sound obtuse here, but the title of your post is "Understanding is translation", which sounds like you are saying that the two are equivalent. If, in your formulation, the two are equivalent, then "Does someone understand X?" and "Can they translate X to Y?" are equivalent questions.
I feel like you've taken a useful insight ("We can help people understand things more easily if we can translate them into a form they're already familiar with") and gone way too far with it, or, at the very least, failed to sufficiently explain your reasoning. You've provided a lot of examples, but the analogy you provided in the first few paragraphs doesn't necessarily work with all of them, so the reader is left to fill in the blanks and guess at what you mean.
...A self-taught singer can translate from heard notes to sung notes, but can't trans
Beauty's physiological state (heart rate, blood glucose level, etc.) will not be identical, and will affect her thoughts at least slightly. Treating these and other differences as random,
Not all of the differences are random, though. Sleeping Beauty will always have aged by one day if awakened on Monday, and by two days if awakened on Tuesday, and even that much aging has distinguishable consequences. Now, I'm not at all familiar with the math involved, but it seems like this solution hinges on "everything" being random. If not everything is random, does this solution still work?
While I agree that "co-proofs" as you've described them are interesting, I'm not sure on how useful they are as a concept. While a lack of counter-evidence certainly helps when we want to argue in favor of a hypothesis, if there isn't enough evidence to bring that hypothesis to our attention in the first place, then we're privileging that hypothesis.
To speak to the example you give, while it is true that for any given person, not having an alibi is a co-proof of their involvement in a crime, there are likely vast numbers of people who don't have ...
I'm curious where you draw your writing knowledge from that seems to consider "source of inspiration" to be, at best, superfluous information? I can't say I've encountered such a guideline before. I suppose I could see an argument that such information doesn't belong in a particular type of writing (like formal writing or technical writing), but that would then require this piece to be the specified type of writing, which I anticipate it likely is not.
Personally, I enjoy hearing about people's sources of inspiration, because such a source might a...
I understand that you do not assume Beauty's experiences are identical on Monday and Tuesday. Rather, my understanding is that you assume that "the set of things it is possible for Beauty to experience on Monday" is identical to "the set of things it is possible for Beauty to experience on Tuesday". Is my understanding incorrect?